


Bemused, Disturbed, Entertained

by lalejandra



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Transformative Works Welcome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-06
Updated: 2005-05-06
Packaged: 2019-07-14 10:13:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16038353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalejandra/pseuds/lalejandra
Summary: time travels in only one direction, but love travels in no known pattern.





	Bemused, Disturbed, Entertained

Liza comes home a little after midnight. As she walks up the stairs, she listens to her high heels click on the polished wood, and thinks about how her stilettos must be leaving divots in the wax, or the polish, or whatever her landlords did to the wood to make it shiny and hard.

She kind of likes the idea of leaving her mark everywhere she goes.

At her door she fumbles with her keys, drops them. Her cat miaows at her urgently through the pressed wooden door--she's late, where has she been?, and with who?, and why?, and doesn't she know that making sure she's home to watch _Stargate: Atlantis_ with him is far more important than whatever else she was doing?

He had to watch it alone tonight, he informs her reproachfully.

When she gets the door open, she glares down at him and says, "You could have _waited_ for me to watch it, you know. You could have watched something else instead."

His name is Not Nathan Fillion, but she calls him Commander because that's all he'll answer to. He's a snobbish cat, and his snottiness is out in full force as he turns his tail on her and marches away. Liza sighs--this means she's going to have to fight him for pillows tonight.

Under his butt was a piece of paper. She frowns at it, crouches--careful not to lose her balance on the heels--and picks it up. Then she overbalances standing up, because her shoulder bag is too heavy, as usual, and ends up on her ass in the doorway, her mail scattered around her, and her knees splayed. From the other room, she hears Not Nathan Fillion laughing at her, miaow, miaow, miaow, muurrhh.

Liza stays where she is, finds the paper. It might be an invitation to a party from the guy on the first floor who keeps asking her if she wants to play kickball ("Not," he always says, "that you look like you need the exercise. I _like_ round women."), or it could be a recipe from Johnny and Elvis for those cat biscuits Not Nathan Fillion liked so much.

She squints at it; she took her contacts out after her fourth drink, so that she wouldn't have to worry about them if she fell asleep on someone's sofa. (But Tommy Junior called taxis for everyone; Liza spent the trip convincing the driver that she was actually from Nigeria, which was surprisingly easy considering her ghost-pale skin, blue eyes, and black hair.) It's poetry, written in a fine copperplate script. That's all her degree in graphic design and typography is good for, recognizing copperplate script versus Goudy. Whoever wrote this, she decides, read a lot of 18th century text in original manuscript. She gets so caught up in examining the handwriting that she forgets to read the text.

There is the snick of a door--opening? closing?--and she's jolted out of her debate with herself (Early 18th century? The letters slant like someone who learned to write in Palmer, or who learned to write copperplate from someone who also wrote Palmer, so maybe 1870 or 1880--so Yeats? Rilke?--) and she really _sees_ the lettering on the page as _text_ :

_Like the memory of someone else's guilt heard through too-thin walls  
I listen for the cadence of her heels in the hall._

Liza looks at her high heels and then back at the poem, and then twists to look behind herself, into the hall. The door across the way is open, someone is looking at her through it. She smiles, but there's no answering smile--there's darkness, there's the glint of eyeballs, there's hair falling through the crack, and then the door is closed. She sighs and stands up, goes into her apartment, collects her mail, closes the door.

Not Nathan Fillion is back in the foyer, twisting around her ankles. She kicks the heels off, which she should have done when she got home anyway, should have walked up the stairs barefoot--but she likes the cadence of her heels in the hall, too.

"What do you think, Commander?" she asks, and when he looks up at her, she'd swear he's quirking an eyebrow. "All right then. Will you love me if I give you a sardine?"

"Moooooowww," says Not Nathan Fillion; his love is not so easily won, but perhaps he'd consider sharing the bed with her if she's willing to give him a treat normally reserved for Monday mornings before she leaves for work.

"Fine," she says, "listen to this first," and she reads the poem out loud. "Definitely Rilke, eh?"

Not Nathan Fillion rolls his eyes and pads toward the kitchen expectantly. Liza says, "Here within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze will be absorbed and utterly disappear," and she tosses her hair, which is only the same rich, deep blue-black of Not Nathan Fillion's coat because she's dyed it so (and she thinks, "Can I even dye my eyes to match my gown?"), and follows him into the kitchen.

**

Liza only wakes up early Saturday morning because she hears someone at the door, and she remembers in a panic that she forgot to lock it. She sits straight up in bed, dislodging Not Nathan Fillion from her chest, where he deigned to sleep after two sardines and a bit of soy milk. He yowls at her and goes for her thigh with his claws, but she's already out of bed, streaking naked through her apartment, grabbing her bathrobe from the floor in the hallway outside the bathroom where she dropped it after her shower. She pushes her hands through the red terrycloth sleeves and ties it as she steps into the foyer.

There's a piece of cardboard on the floor. It smells like pizza. The lettering is a blackface gothic calligraphic print this time, complete with serifs that appear to have been done with a brush. She's impressed, grudgingly (because it's too early in the morning to be anything but grudging about anything that isn't sleep).

Liza opens the door to look into the hallway before she picks up the cardboard. She looks one way and then the other. Someone is brewing really strong coffee--and there's a cup of it at her door. She regards it with suspicion, and is very tempted to drink it (for it's exactly as she likes her coffee: as black as her hair and as thick as her mascara), but she knows better, and she's not even going to touch it.

She stares at the door across the hallway, but no one is there.

The poem says:

_The scent of coffee reminds me of days with will never share  
And words we will never speak._

"Melodramatic, don't you think?" she says to Not Nathan Fillion, and instead of replying, he leans over and licks the grease on the cardboard.

Her head doesn't hurt from the nine vodka drinks (no, she corrects herself; two shots of vodka, three vodka gimlets, a vodka martini, a gin martini with extra olive juice, and a gin and tonic is six vodka drinks and two gin drinks), but the coffee had her salivating, so she puts water on and grinds beans and measures coffee into her french press.

She hangs the two poems on her refrigerator with erotic magnetic poetry magnets: _cunt_ and _juicy_ on the first, and _penis_ , _breast_ , _s_ , _threesome_ , and _shudder_ on the second (it's heavy). Her mouth is dry and tastes disgusting, so while she waits for the coffee to brew, she sips at a glass of tomato juice, and then one of orange juice, and then, finally, she has coffee in her hand and Not Nathan Fillion has a saucerful on the stove.

The other side of her kitchen is the neighbors' kitchen. She hears them in there as she stares at the poetry. Normally she can't hear them; normally she has music on, or the television (Not Nathan Fillion likes to watch the Saturday morning cooking shows on PBS). There's a man and a woman, she knows, both with longish brown hair and--she stops and thinks. Pale skin. They both have eyes and mouths, and they both wear Birkenstocks. She's seen them, sometimes, at the mail box, or the corner store. They don't barbeque on the roof or smoke on the front stoop or knock on her door to ask for a cup of Splenda, which is good, since she only has sucanot and agave nectar and molasses.

There are various paint splatters on their doorknob, and their apartment number is labeled in a collage-type thingie that looks hard and shiny. She's 51, they're 52; she's the fifth floor apartment on the right hand side of the building, and they are the fifth floor apartment on the left hand side of the building.

Liza closes her eyes and pictures their mailbox downstairs, but can't remember their names.

She finishes her coffee and puts on a skirt and a tank top and slides her feet into flip flops. Now that she's awake, she might as well be awake. She puts in her contacts, washes her face, feeds Not Nathan Fillion and kisses him goodbye, and takes an armful of laundry with her. Her keys are in her purse and her wallet is in the pocket of her jean jacket and her grocery list is tacked to the wall next to the door, and she grabs it on her way out, steps over the paper cup of coffee that is still there.

The slap-slap of her flip flops are loud in the pre-10am Saturday morning quiet of her building; almost everyone living in it is under the age of 30, and single. Her neighbors are the two exceptions, although she thinks that if they're in their thirties, they're definitely barely across the line.

The poetry stays in her head as she shops-- _the scent of coffee reminds me_ ; _the cadence of her high heels in the hall_ \--and when she comes home, her arms full of fruit and flowers, she checks their mailbox: 52, KS & VM.

Kansas and Virtual Machine.

She doesn't have any mail.

She leaves her fruit outside the laundry room, but her clothes have already been switched into the dryer. She rolls her eyes (she hopes whoever did that got a kick out of her red lace underpants) and stacks it all on top of the fruit, and hauls her butt up the stairs. The building is still quiet--people are probably just beginning to wake up.

The coffee is gone; now there's a bulging envelope tacked to her door, but she ignores it; it's all she can do to get the lock open before she drops the fruit and apples fly everywhere. As it is, she drops the fruit and her laundry, and peaches crush her flowers, and dirt from the flowerpot goes everywhere, and Not Nathan Fillion strolls in leisurely, doesn't help clean anything up, and settles down for a nap on her black skirt (the short one, with the corset tie in the back, and the lace hem).

Liza sighs, gets everything picked up, pours out the leftover coffee and sets up a fresh pot to brew. There are noises coming from the bathroom of her neighbors, which is pressed up against the wall of her living room. Poor planning on the part of her landlords, but she doesn't care; usually the television is loud enough to drone them out. Not Nathan Fillion has been watching the New Jersey public television station; they must have been having a cooking show marathon. She clicks over to the taped episode of _Stargate: Atlantis_ from Friday night.

"I'm watching the new SGA," she says to Not Nathan Fillion as she cleans up the dirt from the flowers. "You can come watch too."

He rolls over on her skirt, paws in the air.

"I'm not going to rub your belly," she snaps. "You didn't even help clean up the flowers." Instead, she notices, he's _eaten_ the flowers. Stupid cat.

"Fine," she says, when he doesn't even bother replying.

She opens the door and peels off the envelope and flounces out of the room. She drops the envelope onto the futon that doubles as a sofa, brings the french press into the living room so the coffee can brew while she watches television, and sits down.

"I hate _Stargate: Atlantis_ ," she says to no one in particular.

An oddly hollow voice replies, "Me, too!" and for a moment she thinks maybe she's really cracked and Not Nathan Fillion is talking to her--but then she realizes that it's whoever is in the bathroom next door.

"Uh," she says, and stops, and feels stupid. She raises her voice. "We can start a club!"

"Definitely!" comes the reply, and Liza can't help but giggle.

She pours herself a cup of coffee into the same mug she used that morning, and opens the envelope. It's a collage of magazine cut-outs, dried flowers, and what looks like it's maybe some kind of--yeah, it's coriander seed. Hm. It says, in block letters that were apparently written using a tube of orange glitter glue:

 _my neighbor wears black on black on black paired with flipflops._  
she reminds me of Paris in the '70s before a radical was someone  
to be afraid of when wine and music and thought was the only  
food like the presence of god to the angels.

Paris in the '70s and radicals and wine. Liza's been compared to worse.

She's halfway through her fourth reading when the voice from next door talks again.

"Hey!"

"Yeah?"

"You like his dumb poetry?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"You're the only one."

Liza laughs at that too, and thinks about inviting her neighbor over to drink coffee and make fun of _Stargate: Atlantis_ , but then the toilet flushes and the shower is turned on, so Liza just sits back against the futon and drinks her coffee and rereads the poetry, halfway between bemused and disturbed, but fully entertained.

  



End file.
